This article is a bit old, but still very interesting. For example, did you know:

The commissioner at the time was Larry O’Brien and, in the rush to canonize David Stern, there has been an unfortunate tendency to treat O’Brien as though he were kind of an amiable lightweight in a job that was too big for him. This is, of course, nonsense. O’Brien was a deep-game player his entire life, a crucial member of John Kennedy’s New Frontier brain trust, and he helped wrangle the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress on behalf of Lyndon Johnson. Hell, in June of 1972, it was Larry O’Brien’s phone that Howard Hunt sent his burglars back into the Watergate office complex to tap.